A Very British Radical

The next Donald Trump — the next populist insurgent, the next outsider riding a wave of anti-establishment discontent, the next dangerous extremist with a chance to grab the reins of state — was supposed to be Marine Le Pen. In the Western press and Western capitals, there was a summons to the barricade when Le Pen reached the French presidential runoff. The liberal order was in the balance, the whiff of fascism was in the air, the entire French political system was expected to do its duty and keep her out of power.

All this even though Le Pen never came within 16 points of her rival, Emmanuel Macron, in any poll between the first round and the runoff, and ultimately lost by nearly 33.

Now, though, in the imminent British election called by an overconfident Theresa May, a different sort of Trumpian figure is closer to victory than anyone expected. This is Jeremy Corbyn, the radical backbencher turned Labour leader, whose campaign was supposed to be a joke but now finds itself, like Trump’s before it, just a “normal-sized polling error” away from a truly shocking upset.

Yet at this prospect the Western establishment seems more bemused than actively alarmed. Le Pen was cast as the madwoman in the attic, poised to set fire to the mansion. But outside Britain’s right-wing newspapers, Corbyn is portrayed more as the balmy uncle in the conservatory, puttering around with tulips and murmuring about the class struggle. Nobody exactly thinks he would be a good prime minister, but there isn’t a palpable fear that his election would be an emergency for liberal democracy.

In a way this is a good thing, since Corbyn probably isn’t a threat to the liberal order, and in this Trump-crazed moment we could use a little less hyperventilating about politics. (Also, he’ll probably still lose.)

But neither was Le Pen necessarily such a threat, and yet the fascism-in-France freak-out happened anyway. So for the sake of evening the scales, let’s dwell for a moment on what Corbyn’s farther left has in common with her farther right.

First there is the matter of anti-Semitism. Le Pen’s party was an heir to anti-Dreyfusard tendencies and included enough Holocaust-minimizers that one was briefly chosen as the party’s acting leader. If you are troubled by this, good, you should be.

But then you should also be troubled by the Corbyn-era Labour Party’s tendency to find itself explaining why its members, activists and sometimes politicians are merely anti-Zionist and not actually anti-Semitic, even as their critiques of Israel or global finance blur into old-fashioned anti-Semitic cliché. Especially since the intersection of left-wing anti-Zionism and Islamist Jew-baiting is probably a more substantial threat to Jewish security in Western Europe than what remains of right-wing anti-Semitism.

Second there is the matter of historical and ideological associations. Le Pen aspired to be Gaullist, but her party retained a Petainist taint, a connection to fascism and a tendency to minimize its crimes, plus the inevitable far-right links to Putin and his nationalist international.

But Corbyn’s inner circle has a similar minimizing tendency where the crimes of Stalinism are concerned, plus the equally inevitable far-left affinity for Latin American authoritarianism. If the specter of long-ago Vichy lurked behind Le Penism, the specter of present-day Venezuela lurks not that far in the background of Corbynism.

Third there is the matter of terrorism and political violence. Le Pen, through her father and his allies, had an ancestral connection to the far-right violence of the Algerian war-era pieds noirs. But those paramilitary operations are rather more historically distant than Corbyn’s fellow-traveling with the Irish Republican Army at the height of its bombing campaigns, or his habit (for which he recently offered regrets) of offering comradeship to Hezbollah and Hamas.

In the wake of the recent Manchester horror and London attack, the Labour leader has been hitting May from the tough-on-terror right for not adequately funding the police. All’s fair in love and the last week of a campaign, but still it’s a little audacious, since Corbyn clearly has an old revolutionary’s soft spot for a certain kind of terrorist.

Now, one can concede all this and still cobble together a case that Le Pen would have been more dangerous to existing European institutions than Corbyn. She’s a French chauvinist; he’s a lefty internationalist. She wanted France out of the European Union; Britain has already taken that leap (and a Prime Minister Corbyn would probably make Brexit somewhat softer). She traded in clash-of-civilizations rhetoric about Islamic immigration; he’s fluent in the pieties of multiculturalism.

But some of this amounts to saying that it’s O.K. to elect an extremist with anti-Semitic and authoritarian and even terrorist connections if he or she just takes the official European Union line on immigration and monetary policy. Meanwhile Corbyn’s habits of mind on defense policy — think Chomsky with a dash of Trump — could threaten as much destabilization for NATO as Le Pen threatened for the Continent’s monetary union.

Again, I don’t think it would be a better world if Corbyn were being met with Le Pen-level fear and loathing. The entire populist phenomenon, left and right, is happening because our establishment is in need of serious unsettlement, and that can’t happen unless movements and ideas with extreme or disreputable associations are allowed into the conversation.

Her own very-establishment stumbles and weaknesses notwithstanding, May’s attempt to reimagine conservative politics along more populist, “Red Tory” lines strikes me as a healthier response to the moment than Corbyn’s unreconstructed socialism. But after so much centrist failure, I can understand the urge to give the old socialist a chance.

Nonetheless — in allowing the extremes in, we should not be blind to where their worst tendencies can lead. No such blindness is likely where the right’s populists are concerned, since the entire media-intellectual-academic complex of the West has its fascist radar set to “high.”

Where the far left is concerned, though, a haze of elite sentimentality can still settle over ideological impulses that killed people and wrecked countries on an extraordinary scale.

So with Corbyn closer to power than Le Pen ever got, spare a thought for the far left’s actual 20th-century record, and remember that when history’s arc bends away from liberalism and consensus, sometimes there’s a commissar waiting at the end of it.